BASED ON A TRUE STORY

(most of the time) fuzzy logic. Otherwise, why would your significant other marry you?

A

series

by Bad Billy Laveau

Based on these events, it seems the solution to all major problems is to raise taxes. Our founding fathers warned us to guard our pocketbooks whenever Congress is in session. Sage advice for sure. Profound statements, even by those usually in the know, may or may not be accurate. Sometime conclusions are speculations based on fuzzy logic rather that hard proof. Fuzzy logic is when you have some, but not all, of the facts. You extrapolate what a reasonable conclusion might be. We use fuzzy logic all the time. Stock market investment is based on fuzzy logic. Poker is fuzzy logic. Football is fuzzy logic. Marriage is

Medical advances are based on fuzzy logic. Phase I studies. Phase II studies. Phase III studies. But they are not perfect. Remember Thalidomide for pregnant women? A great cure for morning sickness, it was claimed, but some babies were born without arms.

On the other hand, thousands of drugs have been safely approved for human consumption. The FDA is not perfect, but I have faith in their fuzzy logic. They sometimes catch a lot of static for being too slow to approve a given drug. The media, as well as multi-national corporations, look critically over their shoulders. The media needs controversy to drive viewership. Corporations need profits immediately if not sooner to drive up their stock prices.

And on top of all that, we have people in the public eye who desire to be providers of super-bad news to justify their self-imposed position of importance.

Twenty-four-hour cable news access was invented by Ted Turner and CNN. Along with that came Infomercials where anyone with money can have a half hour worldwide TV show. Or a 30 second TV commercial. Remember Peter Popoff’s Magic Spring Chernobyl Water that cured cancer? Or his Magic Water packets that you sleep with and huge amounts of money will surely arrive in the mail?

And now we have political cycles that are as endless as car horns in Jamaica. Or maybe as endless as the stream of “undocumented workers” at our southern border. The only fuzzy logic therein is guessing the number of crossings tomorrow when we are not sure how many crossed yesterday.

But fuzzy logic is necessary for progress. We must take some chances. Calculated risks. And hope for the best. Hopefully, unfolding events will justify our faith in fuzzy logic.

For example, when a new drug is known to cause nosebleeds in one patient out of a thousand, we take the drug with faith we will not get the next nosebleed. A thousand-toone chance is a reasonable risk.

We must separate these reasonable risks based on the scientific method from the proclamations made by wild-eyed camera-seeking proponents with questionable agendas. Sometimes reasonable risks have rough edges. One example is the breast implants used in the 80s and 90s. A huge lawsuit destroyed a company even though it was later shown that women with implants had no more depression, fibromyalgia, arthritis, etc. than women without implants. At present, our TVs are loaded with lawyer ads regarding Roundup weed killer and contaminated water at Camp Lejeune, both now reportedly linked to all sorts of horrible diseases.

Be careful with vaguely associated events. I can find someone who drank water last week and died this week. Both events will be true. And supporting data will be true, but being related does not equal cause and effect. You need not give up drinking water.

Accordingly, we have not plunged into a new ice age, run out of oil, starved because of acid rain, drowned from rising tides, nor suffered demise due to lack of the Green New Deal. Fuzzy logic is a necessary evil loosely tied to science. Tread lightly. Only the Good Lord knows when one of these conclusions might be right.

But also be encouraged. Medical advances and education, extrapolated from fuzzy logic, has doubled the U.S. life expectancy in the past hundred years.